Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

While in-person voting is taking center stage today, mail-in ballots will still be trickling in. Some of them will be deemed invalid, and as the data is tabulated, we’ll get a sense of just how many absentee ballots were rejected.

In every election, a certain percentage of absentee ballots are rejected (the exact share depends on the state and who you ask). Most commonly, this is due to ballots arriving past the deadline, or missing some key information, like a signature. Because a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail this year due to the pandemic, rejected ballots are a bigger concern than usual.

The mistakes that lead to ballots being rejected are more common among voters who have never voted that way before — it’s hard to do something for the first time — and disproportionately affect young voters and voters of color. Some states allow voters to “cure” a ballot with a mistake so their vote still counts, but not all. There have already been signs that ballot rejections could be higher this year: An NPR analysis of 30 state presidential primaries this year found more than half a million ballots were rejected, compared to the almost 319,000 absentee ballots rejected in the 2016 general election. In a few weeks, when all the ballots are counted, we’ll have a better picture of whether rejected ballots were a big issue in 2020, or if it was par for the course.

I’m also keeping an eye out for disinformation making the rounds today. Surprisingly, one of the biggest examples wasn’t spreading online, but over the phone. Robocalls telling voters the election is actually tomorrow or telling voters to stay home have been reported in Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, North Carolina and Kansas. The FBI is now investigating. It should go without saying that today is Election Day. If you want to vote, don’t stay home!

There’s also been a fair amount of fearmongering playing off the few technical glitches I mentioned earlier, with right-wing media framing the hiccups as only impacting pro-Trump districts and raising the specter of something more sinister. Sean Hannity’s website, for example, posted about the voting machines in Spalding County, Georgia, which were down this morning but are now functioning, according to local media. Hannity’s site headlined the story “‘All Voting Machines Go Down in Georgia County That Trump Won by 24% in 2016.” Firstly, districts that went for Trump are not the only ones facing difficulties. Franklin County, Ohio, where e-poll books were malfunctioning, went for Clinton by 26 percentage points in 2016, for example. Secondly, Georgia replaced all of its voting machines less than a year ago, and any time election officials or voters are interacting with new equipment, the risk of a problem goes up.

I’ll be watching for more misleading or false information making the rounds, but feel free to send me examples (on Twitter or email) if you spot anything or have questions.

Latino voters could make a big difference in battleground states such as Florida, Arizona and even North Carolina today. In general, Latinos are more likely to be supporting Biden than Trump: According to a new NALEO/Latino Decisions poll of Latino registered voters, 69 percent of respondents were supporting Biden, while 26 percent were supporting Trump. (The rest were voting for someone else or undecided.) Another recently released NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll showed Biden with 62 percent support among Latino voters, and Trump with 29 percent support.

But the Latino vote is not a monolith, as Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote in September. Latino voters in Florida are likely to vote quite differently than Latino voters in Arizona or Texas; Hispanic men are likelier to support Trump than Hispanic women; evangelical Latinos are more of a swing group than Hispanic Catholics, who are a strongly Democratic group.

For example, aggregated results from nine weeks of NALEO/Latino Decisions polls of Latino registered voters showed that Biden’s support among Latinos is lower in Florida (57 percent) than in Texas (67 percent) or California (71 percent), and his lead in Florida was narrower in a separate Telemundo poll of the state released last week (48 percent support for Biden, 43 percent support for Trump).

These state-level divides are due, in large part, to differences between various ethnic groups. A plurality of Florida’s Latino population is Cuban, and although this traditionally Republican bloc has slowly been drifting toward the Democrats, there are signs that Trump’s confrontational stance toward Cuba is endearing him to Cuban-American voters in Florida this year. The Latino population in Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, is more heavily Mexican-American, which is a group that tends to lean toward the Democrats.

One macro-level factor to watch among Latinos, though, is enthusiasm. Biden clearly has the edge among the group as a whole, but his campaign has been criticized since the Democratic primary for its lackluster outreach to Hispanic voters. A lack of enthusiasm among Latinos for his candidacy could hurt him — especially if Trump stays relatively strong with conservative Latinos and Hispanic men. So one question this year is whether Biden can match or exceed Hillary Clinton’s support among Latinos in 2016, which in turn fell short of Barack Obama’s support among Latinos in 2012. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late September and early October indicated that Latinos are less interested in the presidential campaign overall — we’ll soon see how much that affects Latino turnout and support for Biden.